I think Unity is useless because these kind of inexperienced users almost don't exist anymore. Everybody got used to the "ugly" interface made of contextual menu and "hard" to adjust settings and those who didn't could live with sensible defaults that could always be overridden.
But with Unity it's like if they went out there to replace QWERTY keyboards with friendlier layouts without paying attention that none of the current users already got so used to the on-purpose-unfriendly layout you're actually slowing them down now.
There's no VC or even VC mentality, especially in Italy. Partly it's due to the fact that it's more difficult to make it in a market that is segmented by language barriers, whereas in US you have a critical mass of customers that speak the same language. On the other hand you'll have more competition in US: but that's probably because VC there throw money at anything that moves.
Agree, but maybe we should just outsource it to normal people: the kind of people that haven't got their tentacles around everything that happened in the last 50 years! Like these http://www.beppegrillo.it/movimento/ although the outsourcing idea isn't half bad as long as they're not all former bankers! :)
I'd like to see the Scandinavian countries dealing with the mafia... no, not the one you see in movies that cuts horses' heads, but the one that blows up motorways.
If I was Yahoo I'd think twice before adopting something like Node.js, but if you're a little guy that wants to scale on the cheap and is willing to take risks because the alternative simply won't work for what you're trying to do, then just use Node.js. Django, PHP, Rails with Apache in front of them aren't designed to handle thousands of persistent connections and it would be far more expensive to scale the traditional web-stacks to handle them.
As some Joyent guy was saying there's real resources behind Node.js, it isn't just a cool hack made by some promising Jedi but it needs to fit your use-case. If you're designing a real-time web app and you have a limited budget then go for it, I don't think there's anything better out there now (except for Tornado, Twisted, which is just a matter of taste) unless you're Yahoo, Google, etc...
Google instant is good for tablets/phones, not for desktop computers. Too bad they rolled it out to everybody I don't like it too much either, but can live with it.
Funny, I've been working on a Sharepoint project the last two months. This could have been a 3 man-day PHP/MySQL job yet it required 1 Project Manager and 2 devs (one full-time, 1 part-time) 2 months of work! The reason it took so long is that we couldn't touch code (think paranoid Fortune 50 company).
And then they talk of TCO and miss profits: they throw money down the drain, what do they expect?
Good one! Like the idea. The UI needs some hard thinking but for a prototype it's very good. If you had a vision to actually make this happen and include all other transport options I think you wouldn't have too much trouble finding someone to throw money your way.
A bump like that should be for backward incompatible changes but it actually looks like a makeover to appeal more to serious biz customers that would have trouble getting on to a 1.0 technology.
Facebook could cannibalize all of these markets you mention: nothing prevents them from turning it into a marketplace of new/used stuff and a platform to watch movies on or sell songs. Have a look at the (pirate friendly) Russian vkontakte.ru: whole american TV series and movies can be watched there.